Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Away to California but Back to Mid-Continent - Refinding a Hardy Ephemeral


Better late than never--courtesy of generous friends I was recently able to visit the West Coast for my first time, spending a week in Sonoma County, California. For anyone who has never ridden Amtrak's Empire Builder westward or east along the Canadian border, skirting Glacier National Park in Montana, connecting at Portland, Oregon with the Coast Starlight which climbs up and over the Cascades to chug up or down Oregon and California, it's armchair travel worth the money and the time.

I had never been in California or any of the Pacific Northwest, and never seen a palm tree growing naturally out-of-doors. Occidental, California where we stayed, is in the thick of redwood country and nestles among the hills of the Coast Range. Taking it for granted that in our time the landscape of most inhabited places would still be recognizable to our ancestors a few centuries back, the look of north central California today, take away the grape and olive plantations, the estates and the towns with their ornamental groves of imported trees and flowers, would have been the color, texture and tree outline carried home by the European horseback travelers who first scoped it out as a paradise where they'd make their new homes. Most landscapes must remind a newcomer of places where they'd lived or traveled, but as I made my acquaintance with the definitive trees of this forest, redwood and tan oak, California laurel, interior live oak and Pacific madrone, I knew beyond a daydream that I was on the other side of mountain ramparts distinctly separating me from the Midwest, Ontario and New England, the places I've walked the most. Redwood structures and outlines do not resemble those of any other conifer in my experience.

At Powell's City of Books, the giant used-book store in Portland, Oregon I bought introductory manuals for the trees and wildflowers of California. Especially informative was the older book, Trees of California by Willis Linn Jepson, published by the University of California in 1923. The circular pattern of redwood shoots' maturation into a ring of full-size trees, the centrality of redwood lumber in the history of California's statehood, and the huge diversity of pines and firs to be found if a person traveled inland and northward from Sonoma County are all impressions I gained from that little book with its exquisite pen-and-ink illustrations of cones and foliage drawn to scale in an age before photography could adequately show the hallmarks of trees, herbs, plumage, etc. 

We passed time along the fog-drenched and wind-whipped Pacific Coast, as cold as Duluth and Two Harbors, Minnesota--counter to my biased expectations. My most vivid plant encounter along those state-owned pull-outs and beaches near Bodega Bay was with outcrops of pink and lavender blossoms, their anatomy so much like the fleabane from Midwestern brushlands but growing squat on the ground, the flowers the width of a little girl's hand. The leaves were three-cornered and fleshy like exotic desert foliage, but I wanted to think of these plants, creeping on the ground in typical adaptation to ever-recurring gales, as members of the composite family which includes the daisies, asters and sunflowers. With the other purchase from Powell's, The Wildflowers of California, Their Names, Haunts, and Habits by Mary Elizabeth Parsons (Dover Publications, Inc. of New York, 1966), but most of all with a tip from my host Barbara who called it ice-plant, and then the internet, I learned that these flowers were of a totally other family called fig-marigold, or Mesembryanthemum, most members of which strayed to America from southern Africa. Ms. Parsons, the handbook's author, speculated that the three species known along the California coast may have taken root without the direct help of human hands.

We car-traveled around the county between the towns of Occidental, Guerneville, Sebastopol, Jenner and Santa Rosa, allowing me the chance to walk and see twelve new species of birds, most of which I wouldn't reliably meet east of the Pacific seaboard. From the bus windows between Santa Rosa and Martinez, the train stop, I saw agricultural flatland, always backed by the hazy storm-cloud blue of the dry mountain chain that lends the Coastal Range its special character, the land as a whole provoking impressions not new but familiar, gathered from book- and article-reading down the years, sealed by awareness of being nearly as far west as possible in the continental U.S.

Sun, as in sunny California of course gives this land its reputation for days and days at a time, baking and cracking mud into tiles, irregular hexagons and octagons, in a wildfowl refuge nearly devoid of ducks, that we passed alongside. Fields adjoined streamside groves between dwellings fenced and tree-sheltered, the evening angle of the sun mellowing the daylight across all this semi-arid backdrop of anonymous settlers' westward dreams of space and moderate climate, lives either chosen or settled for, since the settler had run out of choices on meeting the coast. Though I didn't feel at home,  I was glad to have visited here firsthand, as a validation of so much amassed magazine-reading and almost-envisioned vista through the eyes of novelists like John Steinbeck.

In the weeks just before this two-week trek, back in northern Minnesota I had watched one of the most reluctant onsets of spring ever in my memory, snows arriving like sweepings from some overhead storage loft into the month of May. One significant Saturday hour by hour gave way to a parade of overlapping winter and spring weather drama, yielding everything but a summer thunderstorm. That day I was driving backroads north by east from the town of Aitkin--which the previous day had hosted a rare painted bunting that had blown this way from the Gulf Coast region but likely blown homeward before the night's frigid reblast from the north--to the township of Meadowlands. All this countryside is nearly as flat as river delta; much of it was prehistoric lake bed that contains peat bogs. Stopping at the home and work space of good friends I went wandering toward the St. Louis River where the prior week-end I had been startled by blue-violet petals on the woods floor like a revolt, a freakish kind of blossoming in defiance of persistent freezing. This was the native perennial hepatica or, as foretold by its Latin name hepatica americana, a woodland harbinger of spring in the American heartland, modest like so many cold-tolerant plants, the leaves lobed and purple-splotched, a little bit suggestive of a liver.


As I stood over the isolated flowers they looked mostly the blue of the ever-amassing and scattering storm clouds marking that early afternoon rather than lavender. Any effort to start a watercolor out there would take on the speckles of melting snow pellets so I just took photos and hurried back to the house, the whole mood of the day become one of hurry-hurry, gales from the north overhead roaring in the woods canopy, driving clouds, admitting sun, strewing snow that switched to rain and back to white pellets. Sometimes a deluge whitened out my view from the car between meadows but before I got back among the trees the sun would boom into clarity and raise the outside temperature on the car's readout by seven or eight degrees in scant minutes.

Austere border country of a kind shared between the U.S. and Canada, unlike the fields, gardens or redwood sanctuaries of California, has its parallels in a nation of less diverse human culture with fewer naturalized Eurasian trees and shrubs, a more raggedy, homogeneous bushland that resonates as the Canadian provinces, Minnesota and the Dakotas must with lands in Russia or Scandinavia. Inhospitable fens, cliffs and badlands beckon to some people with a fascination that might compare with the allure of moldy basements, industrial ghettos or warehouses good for the game of dungeons and dragons or photography of failing architecture in all its glory of ideals.

Accompanied on that long midday drive by a CD on the car stereo, Nordic Roots, "An ideal introduction to the vibrant traditional music scene developing across the Nordic lands: incredible playing, catchy tunes, brilliant arrangements and strange instruments playing pre-medieval as well as modern compositions", produced by the label NorthSide in Minneapolis,  I was full of themes that deserved commingling, the hepatica or liverleaf at the center because it showed itself in the vanguard of the coming season of flowers. Infinite yearly cycles, condensed into one day's crippled start at spring  felt represented in that music and in that scene of a struggling herb on the ground, carried home in that vision that became this card image.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/154636427/north-country-note-card-blank-card-with?

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